Lithium whitepaper: Hey, Tech! Get Serious About Social Customer Enlistment

Learn about the current state social for tech and why social customer enlistment is a game-changer. Learn how to get social customers to co-create value with you with
…

Learn about the current state social for tech and why social customer enlistment is a game-changer. Learn how to get social customers to co-create value with you with
gamification—done right. Get sustainable social strategies from Lithium.

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Bravo to technology and telecommunications companies!
You are among the most serious about social. A full 86% of
you claim to have implemented at least one social tool—
discussion forums, an online community, a Facebook page,
a YouTube presence or a Twitter handle. You’re ahead of
the second most social industry—professional services—by
nearly 10 points.
Of the four major categories of social technology (networks,
blogs, microblogs and video sharing), social networking
shows the deepest investment, more than doubling between
2008 and 2011.
While all this is important to note, what really matters is what
it means for your business. According to your industry peers,
it means that:
1. Those responsible for creating value in your organization
is radically changing. The customer is now becoming
part of that process in a big way.
2. Work product will increasingly come from self-organized
groups—inside and outside of your organization.
3. Decisions based on opinion and experience will be
replaced by decisions based on data.
the state of
social for tech
High tech, telecommunications
Business legal, professional services
Public administration
Pharmaceuticals
Retailing
Transportation
Health care, social services
Manufacturing
Financial services
Energy
86
77
74
74
69
69
67
64
64
62
companies using at least 1 social technology
Source: McKinsey & Company

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The good news is that tech companies are social leaders.
With a relatively high proportion of interaction workers (high-
skill knowledge workers) tech companies have been quick to
discover how social networking tools can enhance knowledge
sharing and collaboration, and increase productivity.
The not so good news is that few have come close to
unlocking the full potential benefit of social.1
The extent of
this missed opportunity varies widely by industry, but it’s
especially acute for the technology sector which employs a
relatively large proportion of interaction workers. Improved
communication, accelerated research and collaboration,
and better organized role-based tasks are all available
through better application of social technologies. Tech
companies are among those who stand to benefit the most
from their deployment.
50
40
28
23
41
38
32
29
38
33
31
27
23
19
12
NA
2011
2010
2009
2006
social networking blogs video sharing microblogging
social technology adoption Source: McKinsey & Company
The boundaries
between employees,
vendors and
customers will blur
35%
Teams will self-
organize
32%
Decisions will be
based primarily on
the examination of
data rather than
reliance on opinion
and experience
32%
most likely organizational changes,
3-5 years
Source: McKinsey & Company

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The big difference between those tech companies that do
unlock the full potential of social and those that don’t lies in
the extent to which they are able to enlist their customers.
Socially-savvy organizations use social technologies—social
networks, blogs, forums, discussion boards—to enlist
customers to help with tasks and responsibilities that
have traditionally fallen to interaction workers. Things like
answering common questions, providing creative solutions to
problems, creating content around product usage, building
and curating knowledge bases.
And the great news is that we now live in a collaborative
economy. If it’s not already, increasingly, your customer
base will be made of digital natives—arguably the most
collaborative generation we’ve seen by far. Use of social
media has increased 356% since 2006. Those who use social
media regularly—that’s 91% of all US adults online—spend
an average of 11 hours a day connected to the Internet.2
And they’re not all just cooing over baby pics on Facebook.
Here’s what happens when a technology company taps the
naturally collaborative nature of social media and deploys
social technology in a big way.
the power of
enlistment
34%
74%
55%
rely on social
media to guide
purchase
decisions
share purchases
on social networks
choose social networks over
traditional eCommerce sites
when researching purchaes
Social customers love to share
Source: Mediabistro

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the Skype enlistment story
With more than 200 million customers connecting every
month, Skype needed to scale a sustainable win-win
customer experience in order to gain and keep competitive
advantage. Through community interaction (not agent
interaction) they transformed an obscure tech discussion
forum into a bona fide peer-to-peer community—in ten
languages. Enlisting their most engaged customers, their
superfans, to offer speedier answers to new and trending
support questions was a key part of this strategy.
Skype is a prime example of how a technology company
achieves social success in using community to enlist
their customers to help create value. They’ve invited their
customers to play an entirely new role in the business by
enlisting them to act in ways that benefit each other and the
brand. In doing so, they’ve ushered in a new kind of social
media success that’s not only huge, but sustainable.
why enlistment works—it’s sustainable
Today, mastery of the social customer experience is a core
vital sign for high tech companies. But it’s not at all obvious
how to do it well. Loyalty may be your most valuable customer
attribute, but only 13% of consumers and 25% of enterprises
say they’re ‘very loyal’ to their vendors.3
Because enlisted customers are more effective, more
scalable, and more personally relevant (other customers trust
them more than they trust you), they help you acquire and
engage more customers. Enlisting social customers to help
you create value is the basis of getting to that all-important
viral loop of social strategy—something truly sustainable.
Instead of trying to influence every single social customer
yourself, your focus on influencing the influencers will amplify
the effects of all your efforts in the long run.
Your next job is to get acquired customers to participate in
your business—to enlist them, to inspire them to help you
create something of mutual value. Things like customers
helping you to acquire new customers and superfans helping
you create, improve and scale some of your most valuable
content online. Done well, your enlistment strategy drives
real business objectives—things like increased awareness
and new customer acquisition. Customers helping customers
also improves the customer experience and drives increased
loyalty.

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The essence of enlistment is inspiring customers to work
toward a common cause. It’s realized by converting community
members with a shared interest into superfans with a shared
purpose. The reason for enlistment is co-creation.
Think of co-creation as the deepest, most active form of
engagement. When customers are co-creating with you,
they’re doing things that benefit themselves, other customers,
and the brand. The goal is to generate something of such
significant value that it motivates continued participation from
those participating now—and inspires others to jump in and
participate as well.
Your engagement strategy is all about moving customers
from passive engagement —browsing, viewing, downloading—
to increasingly more active forms of engagement—sharing,
curating and creating content. Each level of engagement
from the most passive to the most active creates
progressively greater value.
Co-creation comes in several different forms:
Co-Ideation – When customers submit and vote on ideas
for product features and enhancements
Co-Design – When community members participate in the
development of new programs, campaigns or products
Co-Production - When community members produce
content with the brand that other customers use
A sense of personal identification with the brand is the
hallmark of successful enlistment. When customers co-
create value with you, they become enlisted. And when they
become enlisted, there’s a sense of belonging with the brand.
The trickiest part of enlistment is that customers are not at all
obligated to collaborate with brands. And once they do, they don’t
have to continue. That’s the blessing and the curse of bona fide
customer collaboration: participation is always optional.
Giving consumers absolute freedom to participate, or not, in
customer communities is not just a good idea—it’s strictly
essential. But because participation is optional, it’s not always
easy to get people to make that choice, or to continue making
it. Which begs the question: how in the world do you get them
to participate? What is the secret to long-term enlistment?
getting to
co-creation

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Anyone can make a game that entices people to play a few
times. Very few games, however, are ones people will play for
life. Far too much gamification, the introduction of gaming
dynamics into online social experiences, focuses on what we
call gold star rewards—points, badges, leaderboards, etc.
These sorts of rewards will almost always work in the short-
term and they’re pretty easy to implement. That makes them
super useful to you, but also means they’re not nearly enough
to achieve your long-term business objectives.
In order to reach those, you need to build into your
gamification strategies different time scales of reinforcement.
They need to hook consumers into play straight off, and make
them want to come back even when the game’s not really
the point for them anymore. To do that effectively we need to
understand how to motivate people each step of the way.
The principal human challenge to long-term gamification is
that people eventually master the task before them… and then
they get bored. The trick is to calibrate games with a level of
challenge that exactly matches a player’s skills and ability.
Too easy and it’s boring; too hard and it’s frustrating.
For enlistment to happen you need to do more than get the
customer’s attention, you’re trying to make participation in
your community the satisfaction of a genuine craving. Good
gamification strategies adjust the level of difficulty to match
the player’s skill.
Gamification can (and should be) an essential component of
your enlistment strategy. But it must be done with an eye to
sustainability, because enlistment is long-term by definition—
like loyalty.
You have a lot of gamification tools at your disposal—points,
badges, and leaderboards. Some of these work to reinforce
players immediately, but their effects are fleeting. You
can solve the problem of a short-term effect by cascading
different gamification tools with successively longer
reinforcement timescales.
The figure below shows a progression of reinforcements from
the simplest, single actions to the richest, most valuable
behaviors—reciprocity and collective action.
gamification—
done right

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The progression from short to long-term motivation succeeds
because along the way you and your customers are generating
a lot of value. Customers might start out by working for
points and badges, but they never stay for ’gold star’ rewards.
Customers first get hooked in by points, badges and perks,
then get progressively more deeply engaged as they participate
in useful activities they deeply and personally care about. Fans
become superfans because they personally value the work they
do for you in and of itself. Engaged customers identify with your
brand, take pride in it, and vest their reputations by contributing
to it. Those stronger relationships sustain themselves—and
they’re beneficial to everyone.
Short timescale rewards work fast and quickly and earn a
high level of adoption—they can help you scale. But their
shelf life is short. People figure out the game and get tired of
playing. Then they start thinking they’ve just wasted a whole
bunch of time and they quit.
Consider Foursquare, for example. While gaming mechanics
drive immediate behavior at a huge scale (over 30 million
people play Foursquare) the churn rate is very high (many end
up quitting). Earn three badges and a player is usually pretty
excited, but at 200 badges who really cares anymore? People
figured out the game of Foursquare, and they know they are
just going to get another badge. So they stop.
Long timescale reinforcement mechanics work more slowly,
meaning fewer people get to that stage and only about
1% become superfans. That means with long timescale
reinforcements you get sustainability in exchange for scale.
But don’t forget that this exceptional 1%—your superfans— is
all you really need to scale for social. You might be looking at
just a handful of people who actually complete the journey all
the way to the furthest end of your spectrum.
cultivating
superfans

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What you’re aiming for when it comes to enlistment is
how to get that viral loop going—building something that’s
sustainable over the long haul. In order to get there, you need
to tap into things that motivate your customers intrinsically,
not extrinsically—that is, activities that create value for
themselves. There are two ways to go about that.
the value mechanism strategy
This strategy jumpstarts activity that has intrinsic long-term
value for the player. As consumers engage and participate
in gamified activity, reflect back to them the value they’ve
created. Initially, you just need to reflect the value they’ve
created for themselves to get them hooked and to continue
participating. Gradually, using tools with increasing time
scales of reinforcement, you can shift the players’ focus from
the value they’ve created for themselves to the greater value
created for others. Here are some examples:
1. Start with rewarding customers for consumption,
“Congrats! You’ve read 100 posts!”—things customers
value for themselves. Then move to rewarding them
for sharing, “Yay! You shared a post with 500 friends!”—
actions that bring value to their friends.
2. Move from, “Right on! You’ve rated 100 posts”—value to
themselves—to “You’re a rock star! 100 people find your
ratings helpful”—value to community members.
3. Move from, “Wonderful! You’ve created 10 ideas”—value to
the community—to “Congrats! 3 of your ideas submissions
have been implemented”—value to the company.
4. Move from “10 of your posts have been used in knowledge
base articles”—value to the company—to “1000 people
have viewed your knowledge base contributions.”—value to
the rest of the world.
As customers come to realize the long term value they’ve
created, their motivation for continued participation changes.
Now, it’s the value itself that becomes the primary behavior
driver. At this point you’ve created a positive feedback loop
that reinforces the value customers create.
the motivation mechanism strategy
This strategy jumpstarts a variety of activities that players can
freely explore in order to discover which one motivates them
best. The platform collects all the data from that exploration
and discovery and reinforces the behavior that is most
intrinsically motivating to the players.
A motivation mechanism enlistment strategy is trickier.
Instead of teaching players the value they’ve generated
through reinforcement, it shifts a player’s behavior from being
extrinsically motivated toward more intrinsic motivations—
and it’s not easy. A motivation mechanism uses community
sustainable
enlistment
strategies

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About Lithium Technologies: Lithium social software helps companies unlock the passion of their customers. Lithium powers amazing social customer experiences
for more than 300 iconic brands including AT&T, BT, BestBuy, Indosat, Sephora, Skype and Telstra. The 100% SaaS-based Lithium Social Customer Experience™
platform enables brands to build and engage vibrant customer communities to drive sales, reduce service costs, accelerate innovation and grow brand advocacy.
For more information, visit lithium.com,or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and our own community–the Lithosphere. Lithium is privately held with corporate
headquarters in San Francisco and offices across Europe, Asia and Australia.
The Lithium®
logo is a registered Service Mark of Lithium Technologies. All trademarks and product names are the property of their respective owners.
to figure out a player’s intrinsic motivation from a set of
options—something quite a bit more complex.
Whenever a player is performing a gamified activity, he leaves
behind lots of digital footprints in the form of activity data.
Think of this strategy as setting up a kind of Montessori
classroom, where the students always have a choice of
activities within a prescribed range of options. Only, in this
classroom, we’re carefully monitoring every choice and
coming up with a model of which activities motivate any given
student best.
Once we figure out a fan’s intrinsic motivation, we’re on our
way to sustainability.
sustainable enlistment—a must have for tech
Yes, customer loyalty is important today. But the data shows
it’s not something you can count on. Especially for tech and
telcom companies where the pace of innovation is extremely
high. The next new device, killer app, brand new technology
or better customer experience offering can cause significant
customer defection at any time. Customer loyalty today is only
as good as your last offering.
Enlisted customers are a far more powerful asset for your
business. Because they co-create value with you, their loyalty
is born of a different place all together—not just a sense of
love for your products, but a sense of belonging to your brand.
That enlisted customers also make your more effective,
more scalable, and more personally relevant to potential new
customers, is almost like icing on the cake. The cake is that
they provide a sustainable engine for continued growth and
competitive advantage.
resources
1. McKinsey & Company, The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and
Productivity Through Social Technologies
2. Mediabistro, The Rise of Social Commerce
3. Accenture, Lessons from the Recession: Where Customer Service and
Support Investments Yeild Superior Returns for Media, Communications
and Technology Companies